Crackers are baked in an oven, wrapped into elongated packages, and fed, end-to-end, in random spacing toward a cartoner. It is necessary to change the orientation of the packages from movement in a longitudinal direction to movement in a transverse direction and to transfer the packages in a transverse direction into product buckets of a cartoner. One system achieving those requirements is described in Pat. No. 4,178,120, issued to the assignee of the present invention. In the apparatus of that patent, packages at the end of a wrapper discharge conveyor are thrust transversely off the conveyor into groups of about six packages. Of that group of packages, a transfer device picks off two packages in a longitudinal direction moving them onto a deadplate. From the deadplate, the two packages are swept transversely into product buckets. All of those transfers thus described require a lot of machinery and a lot of space. Further, when it is considered that each cracker oven probably has three wrapper conveyors feeding into a cartoner, the cost and space is obviously tripled.
While operating satisfactorily, the apparatus of Pat. No. 4,178,120 is slow. In an effort to improve the speed of the apparatus, the assignee of the present invention developed a transfer apparatus which is the subject matter of application Ser. No. 479,751, filed Mar. 28, 1983, now abandoned. That apparatus is similar to the apparatus of Pat. No. 2,744,608 in these respects: elongated packages are fed transversely in side-by-side abutting relation into a rotary star wheel or equivalent structure. The star wheel sweeps the packages from the infeed into product buckets passing below the star wheel. While this apparatus provides for the transfer of packages into the product buckets at a higher speed, there still remains the necessity of receiving randomly-spaced packages longitudinally-oriented from the wrapper discharge conveyor and transferring them in a controlled fashion in transverse orientation to the star wheel type mechanism for feeding the product buckets. Until the present invention, the current technology has been to provide a pocketed conveyor feeding into the star wheel type transfer apparatus and to provide mechanism for sweeping longitudinally-oriented packages transversely off the wrapper discharge conveyor transversely onto the pocketed conveyor. While this apparatus has been generally satisfactory, under certain conditions there has been the need for the present invention. The problem has been, largely, that there is a loss of control of the packages as they are transferred onto the pocketed conveyor so that the packages are not oriented precisely at right angles to the direction of movement of the pocketed conveyor. Some packages may be piled on top of one another and the packages may be transversely misaligned so that they cannot be fed properly into the star wheel type transfer apparatus.
It has been an objective of the present invention to provide a right angle transfer for randomly-arriving elongated, longitudinally-oriented slugs, the transfer depositing the slugs on a conveyor such that the slugs do not touch one another. Thus, the transferred slugs do not accumulate and do not crowd and apply downstream pressure to slugs being fed to a cartoner.
It has been another objective of the present invention to provide a transfer in which the slugs, once moved into the transfer mechanism, remain under control.
It has been another objective of the present invention to provide a right angle transfer wherein the articles are deposited onto a pocketed conveyor, having one pocket per article. When the articles are deposited on the conveyor, they are transversely aligned so that they can be received by the mechanism for transferring the slugs into a cartoner without substantial additional transverse alignment and thus do not introduce any problems in the operation of the product bucket transfer mechanism.
It has been another objective of the present invention to provide a pass-through feature wherein the transfer mechanism of the present invention can accept or reject a slug.
It is still another objective of the present invention to provide a system of plural cartoners and/or storage operating in conjunction with the right angle transfer of the present invention with its pass-through feature. The satisfying of this objective of the invention provides for a redundancy and flexibility that is particularly useful in the manufacture and cartoning of crackers as well as other similar applications. In the packaging of crackers, the crackers are formed and baked in ovens. The crackers are wrapped in elongated packages and fed on wrapper conveyors to the cartoner. If a cartoner must stop for whatever reason, the flow of cracker packages must continue, since many minutes would be required to shut down the oven in which the crackers are formed. By providing two cartoners alongside each other, considerable flexibility if provided. For example, the cartoners can be fed equally until one is shut down temporarily, whereupon the other cartoner would handle the entire output from the oven. Alternatively, one cartoner can handle the entire output while the other cartoner is running at an idle speed ready to take over in the event that the first cartoner is down. It is possible to bypass all cartoners and run the product into storage. It is possible to run a cartoner having two packages to a carton on one system while simultaneously running four packages to a carton on the adjacent system. It is possible to take down one cartoner for maintenance while the other cartoner continues to operate. It is possible to eliminate entirely the need for a storage system and return that currently is required to accommodate the flow of cracker packages when a single cartoner system is down.
The objectives of the present invention are attained by the combination of a rotating drum positioned alongside the wrapper discharge conveyor. The rotary drum has a series of compartments spaced around its periphery. A rotating paddle wheel is provided for moving longitudinally-oriented packages from the wrapper discharge conveyor into compartments in the periphery of the drum. Below the drum is a pocketed conveyor. The conveyor has one pocket for each package. If one drum feeds the pocketed conveyor, one pocket passes under the drum for each compartment on the drum that rotates past the conveyor. If there are two or three drums feeding the conveyor, then there are two or three pockets on the conveyor for each compartment on one of the drums. Thus, the number of pockets on the conveyor passing the drum(s) equals the number of compartment on the drum or drums feeding the conveyor.
Further, the drums have axial guides that engage the ends of the packages so as to position the packages onto the pocketed conveyor in a fairly precise transverse orientation.
The right angle transfer of the present invention "squares" the package on the pocketed conveyor, that is, the axis of the package is perpendicular to the direction of travel of the pocketed conveyor. The package is under control from the moment that it leaves the wrapper discharge conveyor, thereby eliminating cockeyed orientation of the packages or any piling of packages on top of one another.
The packages on the pocketed conveyor are slightly spaced from one another, thereby avoiding any piling up of packages with the attendant pressure that tends to cause the packages to pop up and deorient before being transferred into the product buckets.